Show notes
A woman from Cleveland moved to Wisconsin, took the surname of Watts – a man serving five life sentences for killing his entire family – and filed to marry him. Women have been doing this for well over a century, and the ones who later walked away have almost never been asked why.
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FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Eight years after Chris Watts strangled his pregnant wife and smothered their two daughters, a woman from Cleveland has moved to Wisconsin, started signing his surname, and filed paperwork that now sits on a prison warden's desk. And Chris Watts is not the only man in permanent lockup who is seeking matrimony. Later, we’ll look at the women who build relationships with men who will die behind bars, and what draws them in.
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:51.635 = Show Open
00:03:19.353 = Ten Seconds At Dodge Correctional
00:20:26.768 = Shannan, Bella, Celeste and Nico ***
00:48:21.294 = He Will Write Back ***
01:04:25.333 = Dead In All Respects ***
01:24:35.204 = Nobody Counts Any Of This ***
01:29:55.177 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
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Originally aired: August 19, 2026
This episode of Weird Darkness covers the marriage application Chris Watts filed from a Wisconsin prison eight years after murdering his pregnant wife and their two young daughters, and the long record of women who write to, visit and marry men who will never get out.It opens at Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun, Wisconsin, where an inmate may touch a visitor twice, once at the start of a visit and once at the end, an embrace reporting puts at roughly ten seconds. On August 12th, 2026 the Daily Mail reported that Chris Watts, 41, and a 39-year-old Cleveland realtor named Lizzie Henderson had applied to marry inside the Wisconsin prison system. Lizzie had moved from Ohio to Wisconsin with her mother, filed a sealed petition for a confidential name change on September 12th, 2025, and appeared in prison visitor logs roughly twenty times during 2025, plus a visit on Christmas Day of 2024. Wisconsin handles these requests under policy 309.00.06, PIOC Marriages, which routes the application through a marriage coordinator and leaves the decision with the warden. No ceremony or license has been documented, and Watts has no projected release date.From there the episode goes back to the family. The Watts family doorbell camera recorded Shanann Watts arriving home at 1:48 in the morning on August 13th, 2018 at 2825 Saratoga Trail in Frederick, Colorado. She was 34 and fifteen weeks pregnant with a son the couple had named Nico, raising daughters Bella, four, and Celeste, three, and selling Thrive for Le-Vel while her husband worked for Anadarko Petroleum and carried on an affair with co-worker Nichol Kessinger. Watts failed a polygraph administered by Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent Tammy Lee, blamed Shanann for the girls' deaths, then retracted it. A drone over an Anadarko site called CERVI 319 found Shanann in a shallow grave and both girls submerged in crude oil inside storage tanks with eight-inch hatches. Judge Marcelo Kopcow sentenced him on November 19th, 2018 to five life sentences plus 84 years. In a February 2019 interview at Waupun, Watts described smothering Celeste in his truck while Bella sat beside her, and hearing Bella's last two words, "Daddy, no!", every time he closes his eyes.The second half opens in the autumn of 1921, when French railways ran extra trains to Versailles for the trial of Henri Désiré Landru, a furniture dealer who placed lonely-hearts advertisements in Paris newspapers and murdered eleven people. Women mailed him proposals of marriage while he awaited the guillotine. The modern version runs through Meet-An-Inmate, launched in 1998, and WriteAPrisoner, founded by Adam Lovell in 2000, which post profiles written on paper because American prisons allow no internet access; Susan Smith drew more than six thousand letters before pulling her listing in 2003. Hybristophilia, the term journalists reach for, was coined by sexologist John Money in 1986 and has never appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Sheila Isenberg's Women Who Love Men Who Kill, forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland's "perfect boyfriend" model, and sociologist Megan Comfort's San Quentin fieldwork in Doing Time Together supply what the women themselves say they are getting.Two 2025 studies found that actively seeking out romanticizing TikTok content correlated with attraction while passive exposure predicted nothing. The risk is documented in the killings of Regina Capobianco and John Mann by her pen pal Thomas Knuff in Parma Heights, Ohio, and in the strangling deaths of Stephanie Dowells and Tania Thomas during family visits at Mule Creek State Prison. The marriages run from Nina Van Zandt, who married Haymarket defendant August Spies by proxy in 1887 and may have married an innocent man, through Ted Bundy and Carole Ann Boone, Doreen Lioy and Richard Ramirez at San Quentin, the Twinkie that served as Erik Menendez and Tammi Saccoman's wedding cake, and James Whitehouse, who wrote to Susan Atkins in 1985 and went on to Harvard Law School to serve as her attorney. All of it rests on Turner v. Safley, the 1987 Supreme Court decision in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor noted that most inmates are eventually released, leaving the man who never will be an untested case. Rhode Island's 1909 civil death statute declared lifers "dead in all respects", and Britain barred whole-life prisoners from marrying in 2024 after Milly Dowler's murderer Levi Bellfield was granted permission.The episode closes on the women who leave, absent from every study in the field. Lynn Hartman ended her engagement to Steven Avery in October of 2016 and wrote that she had been fooled by the Netflix documentary. Paula Williamson married Charles Bronson at HMP Wakefield in November of 2017, had it annulled in 2019, and died that July at thirty-eight. Anna Eriksson divorced Lyle Menendez in 2001 and still argues for his release. No agency counts prison marriages, and every figure circulating online is unsourced. Chris Watts belongs to a long file rather than a new one, having received his first letters from strangers within weeks of his December 2018 sentencing, before he had written a word to any of them.
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